Posted by Bryan Moran
a resident of Pleasanton Heights
on Jul 2, 2013 at 11:00 pm

This is a very good story, and in that spirit let me add some more, perhaps juicier details. The name Pleasanton was indeed a misspelling error, but the town had a name before that, it was Alisal, known as the most desperate town in the West! Indeed shootouts, desperados, and dangerous men roamed the streets. It was a re-branding moment as Alisal was no place to for good people to be from. I guess it worked, because it's a nice place now.
But it took a looong while to become so quaint. In the 50s, 60s and 70s most of the other towns around us were re-developed. They tore down the old building and put up a fancy new-fangled thing called a "Strip Mall", so much better than old brick buildings from the 1800s. So Dublin, San Ramon, and even Livermore lost a lot of their character. Pleasanton was so poorly thought of that no one wanted to invest in re-development, so Pleasanton has a nice downtown full of history, the other "improved" towns, not so much.